World's Largest Milky Way Image Unveiled

by SPACE.com Staff | December 02, 2009 12:22pm ET

A section of the largest image of the Milky Way ever created. It was stitched together from 800,000 individual infrared images taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Wisconsin

The world?s largest picture of the Milky Way, taken by
NASA?s Spitzer Space Telescope, is being unveiled today at the Adler
Planetarium in Chicago.

The new image is of galactic proportions, covering an area
that is 120 feet (37 meters) long, 3 feet (1 meter) tall at its sides and 6
feet (2 meters) tall in the middle, where our galaxy's central bulge is
depicted.

The panorama represents the combined effort of two Spitzer
survey teams, who used two of the telescope's onboard instruments, the Infrared
Array Camera (IRAC) and the Multiband Imaging Photometer.

The large image was made from
stitching together 800,000 individual pictures taken by Spitzer, for a
total of 2.5 billion infrared pixels. It covers an area of the sky about as
wide as a pointer finger and as long as the length of arms outstretched, which
might sound small, but covers about half of the entire galaxy, says Robert
Hurt, of the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech.

"This is the highest-resolution, largest, most
sensitive infrared picture ever taken of our Milky Way," said Sean Carey
of the Spitzer Science Center, who led one of the teams that created the image.

"I suspect that Spitzer's view of the galaxy is the
best that we'll have for the foreseeable future. There is currently no mission
planned that has both a wide field of view and the sensitivity needed to probe
the Milky Way at these infrared wavelengths," said Barbara Whitney of the
Space Science Institute in Madison, Wis., also part of one of the Spitzer
teams.

The image is set to be unveiled by the scientists who
created it at 3 p.m. EST at Chicago's Adler Planetarium.